"The juiciest lemon I ever struck"

All eight of the postcards shown here (see previous post) were published by companies in Sullivan County, New York but have markings indicating that they were printed in Germany. Six of the eight are so identical in typography and in the layout of the address side of the card that it seems likely that they were printed by a single firm. Those six bear the imprints of J. Fahrenholz in Liberty, NY, of Foyette Souvenir Store, also in Liberty, or of H. M. Stoddard & Son in the nearby hamlet of Stevensville (since renamed Swan Lake). The remaining two cards, which were published by Milspaugh & Co.*, a drugstore in Liberty, appear to be the work of a different printer.

It's possible that sales reps from the major post card printers made regular circuits through the region, soliciting orders for custom postcards from local drugstores and the like, and perhaps even themselves taking the original photographs at the same time, but the stores may also have submitted their orders by mail. The American Druggist & Pharmaceutical Record for 1909 includes both advertisements from companies offering to make custom postcards from negatives and a "Business Opportunities" ad from the Souvenir Post Card Co. on Mercer Street in New York City seeking a salesman for "the best view and fancy post-card proposition ever offered."

The images below are in chronological order by postmark date, except for the last one, which has an unreadable year. I've added some punctuation for clarity. Ferndale and White Lake are other communities in the general vicinity of Liberty.


"Where the trout abound, Stevensville, N. Y." Published by J. Fahrenholz, Liberty, N. Y. Postmarked June 9, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "Love from Nan(?) and Margaret."


"Peace and queitude (sic) at Ferndale, N.Y." Published by J. Fahrenholz, Liberty N. Y. Postmarked July 30, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "Also at the farm. Annie L."


"K 2472 Post Office and North Shore, White Lake, N. Y." Published by Milspaugh & Co. Postmarked August 10, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "Enjoy life while you may. Be an athletic girl. These are my mottos now. The same for yours. Margaret."


"K 2480 Old Stone House, WHITE LAKE, N. Y." Published by Milspaugh & Co. Postmarked August 30, 1907. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin. Inscribed (on front) "Erected in 1807. Compare with [P.S.?] '72.'" (on back) Am thinking of remaining here forever. Will you join me? The school buildings here appeal to me. Sincerely, Margaret."


"Bridge at Old Mill Pond, Stevensville, N. Y." Published by H. M. Stoddard & Son, Stevensville, N. Y. Postmarked June 24, 1908. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin, inscribed "How did you enjoy your trip Declaration Day? Aunt and I are taking life easy. The weather is very hot. Love to Mary and Yourself. Nan."


"In the woods, Ferndale, N. Y." Published by J. Fahrenholz, Liberty, N. Y. Postmarked August 15, 1908. Addressed to Teresa Bergin; no inscription.


"Panorama of Swan Lake looking south, Stevensville, N.Y." Published by H. M. Stoddard & Son, Stevensville, N. Y. Postmarked August 15, 1908. Addressed to Miss Mary Bergin, inscribed "Dear Mary, Aunt is home and will be over to see you soon. Love to all, Margaret."


"View showing Swan Lake and Walnut Mt., Stevensville, N. Y." Published by Foyette Souvenir Store, Stevensville, N. Y. Postmarked August 25, 190?. Addressed to Miss Teresa Bergin; inscribed (possibly in reference to Stamford, NY, in Delaware County) "Stamford was about the juiciest lemon I ever struck, and that ain't no lie. Molly."

* In census records for 1910 a Marie Milspaugh is listed as a retail merchant of drugs in Liberty, NY. She was a widow with two young children; her mother-in-law lived with the family.

Notes for a Commonplace Book (9)

On the care of books:

When in 1773 the Society of Jesus was ordered dissolved, the books stored in the Society's house in Brussels were taken to the Royal Library of Belgium, where it was found that there was no place to house them. As a result, they were brought to an old church that was infested with mice. The librarians came up with a plan to protect the most valuable books, which they placed at the center of the nave, arranged on bookshelves. The dispensable volumes were then piled on the floor in concentric circles, so that the mice could gnaw away at them, thus preserving the ones in the interior intact.

I don't know if it worked.

From Jesús Marchamalo, Tocar los libros.

[Aurora Bernárdez and Julio Cortázar] traveled through Italy in the mid-1950s, moving by train from one city to another. In order not to have to carry unnecessary weight with them they decided to buy books in the kiosks in the stations. They chose inexpensive editions, on cheap paper and badly bound, which they would read together during their trips. Julio would almost always begin. As he turned each page he would rip it from the book and pass it to Aurora, who would read it and then toss it out the window.

That flying library, secret and invisible, has always seemed to me a metaphor of Cortázar: the leaves carried off by the wind.

And I'm tempted by the idea of retracing that journey through Italy, starting from the South, following the rail lines that were splashed with pages from that reader, Cortázar, who sent them marching out the open window while his gaze was lost in the landscape, at times, from the interior of the train.

From Jesús Marchamalo, Cortázar y los libros.

(These are very loose translations.)

Cortázar and books

Nine years after Julio Cortázar died in Paris in 1984, his library of some 4,000 volumes was acquired, with the co-operation of his literary executor (and first wife), Aurora Bernárdez, by the Fundación Juan March in Madrid. Cortázar y los libros, a slender but genial book published by Fórcola Ediciones and generously illustrated (in black and white), represents a personal tour through Cortázar's library by a Spanish writer and journalist, Jesús Marchamalo.

Cortázar was widely read in at least three languages, and his library thus includes a broad range of titles published in French and English as well as in Spanish. He was a heavy annotator — what Anne Fadiman refers to as a "carnal" rather than a "courtly" book lover — who felt no compunction about marking up his volumes with marginal notes, underlinings, objections and agreements, and various doodles and scribbles whose meaning, if any, is unknown. Many of the volumes bear personal dedications from fellow writers such as Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Elena Poniatowska, José Lezama Lima, Rafael Alberti (whose dedication is woven into a full-page drawing), and the poet Alejandra Pizarnik (a good friend whose progressive mental decline is painfully evident in her inscriptions). A few of the books were apparently borrowed from other writers and never returned, including a volume of Luis Cernuda's poetry with Mario Vargas Llosa's name written inside it and an anthology of Catalan poetry personally inscribed to Gabriel García Márquez and his wife Mercedes. There are some impossible, fictional dedications, including one by Thomas de Quincey, who salutes Cortázar from beyond the grave as "a friend of Mr. Keats, I think?" And there are some mysteries, such as who — Cortázar himself, a wife or lover, or a previous owner? — left a number of pressed flowers in a copy of Baudelaire's Fleurs de mal.

The books document Cortázar's reading interests through various phases of his life from the 1930s onward, but there are unexpected gaps in the shelves, and the absence of certain titles in the library of an author who traveled widely and lived in various places shouldn't be taken as evidence that he never read or owned them. There is no Camus, no de Beauvoir, no Duras, no Tolstoy or Turgenev, and surprisingly little by Vargas Llosa (a good friend, despite their political differences) or by García Márquez (no Cien años de soledad, notably).

Marchamalo's book — as yet untranslated — makes no pretense of being a scientific survey (hopefully other hands will take up the task) and raises as many questions about Cortázar's reading as it answers. But for anyone interested in Cortázar's work and character, or in the ways in which readers and writers shape — and respond to — their own personal libraries, it will be a unalloyed delight.

Update (2014): For Tororo's French translation of this post, visit A Nice Slice of Tororu Shiru.

The Bergin postcards: an introduction

These cards, postmarked between 1905 and 1908, were mailed, with one exception, to two women who resided at Canonbury Road (now 90th Avenue) in Eastwood in Jamaica (Queens), Long Island; the two recipients, who were probably sisters, were addressed as Miss Teresa Bergin and Miss Mary Bergin. The sole exception is the earliest dated card, shown above, which was sent, if I'm reading the initials correctly, to a Miss T. T. Bergin at 264 W. 115th St., N.Y.C.


The senders, where they can be identified, were several different women, though because of the vagaries of nicknaming some may actually have been the same people. They were probably in their teens or early twenties; one sender refers to the aunt who accompanies her. Based on the evidence of their names and one card that depicts a church they may have been Roman Catholics.


All of the cards shown here were postmarked in the vicinity of the town of Liberty, which is located in Sullivan County in the Catskills. Even then it was already a resort area, and the cards were mailed between June and early September, so it's quite likely the women were summering away from home, either as vacationers or conceivably as resort workers, though there's nothing on the cards to suggest the latter. Together the images depict a kind of idyllic, marginal zone, thinly populated, not quite wilderness but close enough to it that the women could smell the fresh air and be safely away from the crush of the urban crowd (and apparently, from any need to work from a living). There are few traces, either in the messages or in the postcard views, of the presence of the male sex.


We don't see, naturally, what these images and inscriptions choose not to show us, and we should be careful not to assume that it isn't there. All of the color you see, by the way, is artificial, having been layered by various techniques onto what began as black-and-white photographs.


The postcard craze of the early years of the 20th century began in Europe, and the leading printers were in Germany, where all of these cards were printed. Some of them were distributed by Rotograph, a large company that published tens of thousands of different cards, while others were printed for long-forgotten small-town souvenir shops and drugstores in the Catskills. In some cases identical typography is used by different issuers, implying that they shared the same German printer and perhaps placed their orders through the firm's traveling salesmen. The existence of such a sophisticated international network, one capable of bringing imported custom printing to even rural communities, is a reminder of just how far globalization had already advanced a century ago.



As is more often than not the case with any new means of communication, the rise of the postcard was greeted with a fair degree of hand-wringing. Like the paperback novel later on, it was tainted by association with the minority of examples that were risqué or regarded as vulgar. The ones pictured here are inoffensive enough, of course, but there were deeper issues. Many observers felt that scrawling a few banalities on the back of a card was a poor substitute for the composition of a well-written letter, an art which would inevitably suffer as a consequence. (Little did they know what else the future would bring). Moreover, since the postcard was mailed without an envelope, some thought it indiscreet to expose anything other than a pro forma salutation to the prying eyes of the postman.




In future posts I'll look more closely at some of these images and their inscriptions, as well as some other cards sent to the same recipients. I may, possibly, try to pursue the trails of the Misses Bergin and their correspondents through census records and the like, in order to get a better idea of who they were and how they lived, although something could be said for letting them stay as they are, hovering like phantoms on the margins of sight, as befits the delicate irreality of these images. Of course, if we do become better acquainted there's always the risk that I may find them slipping away from the narratives I attempt to weave around them. For their part, they might not have been thrilled to discover that I've been rifling through their mail.

(I'm indebted to Daniel Gifford's unpublished doctoral dissertation, To You and Your Kin: Holiday Images from America’s Postcard Phenomenon, 1907-1910 (PDF), for much of the contextual information included above.)

Postscript: According to federal census records, in 1900 the two sisters were living at 264 W. 115th Street, along with two brothers, Michael, a mail carrier, and Thomas, whose occupation is listed as "collector - clothing." Theresa (spelled thus) was already 27, Mary 34; their parents' country of birth is given as Ireland. They must have lived at that address at least into the summer of 1905 before moving out to Queens.

The List of Enrolled Voters, Fourth Assembly District, Borough of Queens (NY) issued December 31, 1919 records Teresa Bergin, Mary C. Bergin, and Thomas H. Bergin as registered Democrats residing at 51 Canonbury Road. There is no mention of Michael. In the 1930 census, the three siblings still resided, unmarried, on what was now called 90th Avenue. Theresa, a public school teacher listed as the "head of household," was the youngest at 55; Thomas, an order clerk in an office, was 60, and Mary, whose occupation is listed as "housekeeper," was 63.

Another card, not shown here, suggests that there was at least one other Bergin sister who married and may have had at least one child. Her initials under her married name were A. H.

The Asiago Bunny

The following story engages the two central themes of Western Literature, which are, of course, the possibility (or impossibility) of true love and the tragic fate of the pre-industrial artisan in an economy of mass production. Asiago is a kind of cheese.

"The Asiago Bunny: An Edifying Tale for Children"

With apologies all around

Many years ago, in a small village, there lived a cheesemaker named Granola. His was a lonely life; while everyone else in the village was having a good time he spent his days stirring vats of fermenting milk with a garden rake and waiting for the balls of cheese he had hung from the rafters to age, and he longed for a companion with whom to share his misery.

One day he became so completely unhinged that he picked up his penknife and resolved to do himself an injury, until his glance happened to fall on a wedge of asiago that was attracting flies on a shelf. Something about the way the light shimmered on that hunk of lifeless cheese suggested to him the outline of a face, and in an instant the cheesemaker was furiously gouging out pieces of it with his knife, until, in a few moments' time, he had sculpted the perfect likeness of a bunny, complete with soft, stumpy tail and lovable bunny face.

He nestled his creation in his arms and whispered to it as he rocked it back and forth; then he cleared a place for it on his cheesemaking table and set it down softly, reassuring it with a gentle pat on its innocent soft head. Through the rest of that day, as he went about his cheesemaking chores with more than usual esprit, he conversed with the bunny and shared his sorrows and dreams and sang to it his songs of the cheesemaking life.

When the sun went down and his work was through he gathered up the bunny and retired to his dusty garret, making a cradle for it on his tiny table alongside his only other possessions, a single stumpy candle and a half-filled bottle of wine. Before he snuffed the candle out he gazed into the eyes of his companion and sighed and said “Oh, if only you were a real bunny!”

That night, as Granola lay asleep, the Cheese Fairy glided through his window, beheld the sleeping cheesemaker and his inert creation, and with one sweep of her wand changed the carved cheese into a real bunny, with long white teeth and soft fur but with a body that was still only made of cheese. The bunny opened its limpid eyes and looked around, then climbed onto the bed beside the cheesemaker and began to gently nuzzle his ear. The cheesemaker rolled his head about but did not awaken, and the bunny curled up at his side and went to sleep.

After a while, however, it woke up and began to explore the room; it found the bottle of wine and sniffed at it tentatively, then pushed it over and drank the contents. Within a few moments the bunny began to feel unwell and lay down, and soon after it became completely unconscious.

When the cheesemaker awoke the next morning he looked down at the empty bottle and the motionless bunny beside it, and could not remember anything that had happened the day before. He picked up the bunny in his large, calloused hands, sniffed its curious aroma of mingled wine, cheese, and small herbivorous mammal, and shrugged his shoulders. He carried it downstairs, put it in a pot, and cooked it over the fire for a while, then smeared the steaming, savory, melted mass onto the remains of a loaf of bread and ate it for breakfast.

Several readers have objected to the manner in which the bunny drains the wine, pointing out that a bottle resting on its side will retain a substantial quantity of liquid, and that it is unlikely that the bunny would have the strength to raise the bottle over its head in order to invert it and drain the balance. The objection is simply addressed: the bunny lowers himself slowly over the edge of the table, tilting the bottle after him until he finishes the contents, then allows the bottle to rock back into its resting position on the table.

(From 2004 or thereabouts, previously posted on my old site.)

Babel

According to historian Bruce Watson, when William Wood's massive textile mill on the Merrimack River in Lawrence, Massachusetts was completed, in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, it was regarded, at least by the locals, as "the eighth wonder of the world":

The size of the building simply boggled the imagination. The mill had two parallel wings each 1,937 feet long, 500 feet longer than the Empire State Building if laid on its side. The mill's sprawling floors housed 1,470 power looms along sixteen miles of aisles... Enclosing thirty acres under one roof, employing a small city of six thousand workers, the Wood Mill was to textiles what Pittsburgh was to steel -- the very symbol of consolidation and power.

Its workforce, and the workforce of the city's other mills, included representatives from some 30 nationalities, among them Armenians, East European Jews, French Canadians, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Irish, Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, Portuguese, Russians, Scots, Syrians, and Turks. Many of the groups had their own newspapers, businesses, and places of worship.

On January 11, 1912, angered by a pay cut, workers at one of the city's mills walked out. The strike quickly spread, and over the next several months the city witnessed one of the most intense struggles between labor and management in 20th-century America, drawing in everyone from "Big Bill" Haywood and the Wobblies of the IWW to Harvard students assigned to serve in the local militia. (Watson's Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream tells the story in full.)


This postcard of the Wood Mill was mailed six years after the strike and four days after the signing of the armistice that ended the First World War. There are many other contemporary postcard views of the Lawrence mills; this one, published by L. L. Lester, a firm in nearby Lowell, is not the most aesthetically pleasing and in terms of lithographic technique it's pretty crude, but it does convey the vast scale of the mill. It was addressed to a Mrs. J. Liverman at "Suit 25," 888 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. The sender's name could be "Jos.," maybe her husband Joseph or Josef. He or she wasn't necessarily a mill worker, perhaps just a traveling salesman on business.


I have no idea even what language family this message belongs to (Slavic? Baltic?), but would love to hear from someone who does, and who could perhaps even transcribe and translate it. The only words I can pick out with reasonable certainty are "Malden Sq."

Update: I'm told that the language is Russian and that the message is something like:

Dear Shura,

I'm thankful to say I'm alive and well, and wish you the same. Go tomorrow to the station at Malden Sq. and wait for me, I'll be there half past six or a bit later. Be well. See you tomorrow[?]

Thanks to the good folks at WordReference.com for identifying and transcribing this.

Postscript: According to federal census records from 1920, the Joseph Liverman at 888 Massachusetts Avenue was a sign painter, aged 35, who lived with his wife, Anna. He was born in Russia and had immigrated to the US in 1910. By September 23, 1923, according to U.S. Naturalization Records indexes, he had moved to 30 Upham St. in Malden, Massachusetts; here his date and place of birth are listed as May 6th, 1885 in Odessa, and his occupation as "sign writer." According to the 1930 census he was still living in Malden and working as a house painter; his wife's name is given as Adelia but since her age matches Anna's she was probably the same woman. It's interesting that although the 1920 census lists the couple's native tongue as "Russian," the 1930 census instead indicates "Yiddish."

Central Viaduct, Cleveland Ohio

"A street car went through this viaduct several years ago killing all passengers."

Postcard, the Rotograph Co., probably printed before 1908.

The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History has an account of the disaster:

The Central Viaduct streetcar accident occurred on the dark, foggy night of 16 November 1895. Cleveland City Railway Co. streetcar No. 642, on the Cedar-Jennings route, plunged through the open draw of the Central Viaduct into the Cuyahoga River, over 100 feet below. The mishap resulted in 17 deaths, making it the worst traction accident in the United States at that time and the worst such disaster in Cleveland's history. It was the second trip that evening for motorman Augustus Rogers and conductor Edward Hoffman. There were 21 people aboard, many of them women and children who had boarded the car downtown. Visibility was poor as the car approached the derailer switch. Hoffman went ahead, threw the switch, and motioned the car forward, jumping aboard the rear platform as the car passed. Unknown to either man, the draw was open, permitting the passage of a tug towing two vessels, and the power cutoff had not operated for some time.

Peering through the mist, Rogers thought he saw that the draw was open over the tracks, but since there was still current, he dismissed the idea. As he increased the throttle, the mist cleared, revealing the open draw. Slamming the transmission into reverse, Rogers and three passengers leaped to safety. Crashing through the warning fence, the streetcar plunged downward, striking a support piling and rebounding into 18 feet of water. Only one passenger survived the plunge, Patrick Looney, and he spent the rest of his life as an invalid due to of (sic) the injuries he sustained.

Two more Bowery views

Belle époque Paris boasted its arcades and flâneurs; turn-of-the-century Manhattan had strolls under the El. This postcard, which was mailed in 1910, was issued by the firm of Theodor Eismann, which had branches in Leipzig and New York and published cards with the Theocrom brand. It's a lithograph based on a photographic original, with considerable added color, thus neither strictly a photograph nor an artistic "print." The obviously photographic ironwork in the lower righthand corner hardly seems to belong to the same image as the cartoonish buildings in the background in the upper right, yet the whole composition has a distinct liveliness and beauty.

The Bowery was once New York's theatre district, rowdy and open to all classes in a way that Broadway wouldn't come to be. The poster on the sidewalk appears to advertise the London Theatre, founded by the impresario and politician Henry Clay Miner, but the London itself was several blocks away at at 235 Bowery. I haven't been able to find out what the Saranac at 57 Bowery was, but there's a photographic view of the same sign here at Shorpy (you'll have to click through to the enlarged version there to see the sign in the lower righthand corner).


The card above, published by the Rotograph Co. some time in the first decade of the 20th century, looks down the Bowery from where it ends at Cooper Square. It appears to be a collotype rather than a lithograph, but once again the image has been extensively colored. Browning, King & Co., the large building on the right, was a clothing chain with stores in several cities.

Below, a few thoughts which are not meant to provide any kind of rigorous analysis of these hybrid pictures but rather an attempt to come to terms with why I find them particularly interesting.

An image that is entirely one thing or another -- a photograph or a print or a painting -- is an object that purports to be existentially intact and complete, a fulfillment, to the degree that it succeeds, of a single artist's intentions and abilities. (In saying that it only "purports to be" I am, of course, deliberately deferring to another time the issue of how reading the context of an art work affects our understanding of it.)

An image that has originated in one process but which has then been visibly altered by being subjected -- usually by someone else -- to techniques from another process, an image that continues to preserve visible evidence of having been "worked on," is an image that refuses to be complete, refuses to be "flat." When we examine such an picture we see a disjuncture, a clash between multiple processes and multiple creators, and that conflict re-opens the image -- in fact it refuses to allow the image to re-close. Instead of seeing an "artistic statement," we see an unresolved dialogue. An image that may have originally intended to be documentary, to represent what is as closely as possible, takes on a layer in which what will appear is shaped by an entirely different set of aesthetic or market considerations, but without entirely erasing the trace of the original or revoking its documentary claims. There is no way of deciding how much "weight" to give to the claims of one partner in its creation or another.

In some cases retouching may take over an image and conceal the original entirely. When that happens the underlying structure remains but by no longer being apparent on the surface it loses its destabilizing power. It has become fully contained.

Of course photography is never merely documentary; the way in which an image is framed and developed is necessarily guided by the photographer. But we don't see the photographer, at least at first sight; we only see the image. In a hybrid image, on the other hand, we see visible evidence of the ways in which one set of intentions and processes interferes with another.

There are some of them here yet

This postcard was mailed from Noboribetsu on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido on May 12, 1914 and addressed to E. J. Thompkins in Albany, NY. The inscription on the back reads "These people inhabited Japan before the Japanese came here and there are some of them here yet." The name of the sender seems to have been Henry Russell. Was he in Japan on business, as a tourist, or for some other reason? (Intriguingly, a Henry Russell, who had a Japanese mother, was born in Yokohama in 1880, but that may be pure coincidence.)

The town of Noboribetsu (the name is derived from the Ainu language and is said to mean something like "dark river") is today known for its hot springs. It also boasts an Ainu museum village. Though the photograph doesn't necessarily represent Noboribetsu itself -- it could have been elsewhere in Hokkaido -- I wonder whether the scene depicted might not have been a tourist trap even then.

The card, which was undoubtedly part of a series, was probably published by the Tomboya company in Japan. It lacks the little dragonfly in the front right-hand corner that was Tomboya's emblem (tombo or tonbo means dragonfly in Japanese), but there is a dragonfly on the back next to a row of characters. The photographer could have been Takaji Hotta, whose work was often published by Tomboya. The caption below the photograph (its true color is blue-green) has been printed so firmly that an impression can be felt on the back.


The block on Hamilton Street in Albany where E. J. Thompkins lived apparently no longer exists.

Postcards, continued

Below, two more examples of the mutability of historical images, as filtered through various technologies employed in the mass reproduction of postcards in the first half of the 20th century.


This Real Photo postcard from an unnamed commercial studio (almost certainly the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co.) depicts the Waldo-Hancock Bridge in Bucksport, Maine. The bridge was completed in 1931, so the image probably dates from the early 1930s. (A newer structure at the same location was completed in 2006.)

In the postcards below, which appear to be later modifications of this image, the steamer becomes a sail boat, or disappears entirely, obeying whatever the whims of marketing or aesthetics were at the time they were produced. Despite extensive retouching and radically shifting color palettes it seems almost certain that the card images began as copies of the photographic print. The bushes and trees in all three views have almost exactly the same branch structure and orientation, even though in one of the views an attempt has been made to suggest fall foliage.


The next two postcards show the Equitable Building in Manhattan. The first, postmarked 1919, is from an unknown publisher and is probably a tinted halftone. The second version shows a virtually identical perspective -- note the horse-drawn wagon at bottom left -- but by day. All of the indications of night seen in the former image -- the moon, the dark clouds, the illuminated windows, and the glowing lamps above the sidewalks -- are artifacts of the printmaking process, as are the sky coloring, the red of the adjoining building, and the flag in the daytime card. Underlying both cards is the ghostly trace of a single black and white photographic original, now possibly lost.



Mass-produced postcards were never intended to meet high evidentiary standards, of course, but their wide distribution must have had a profound effect on how people regarded their surroundings and how they interpreted two-dimensional representations of sights both familiar and distant. These cards sought to portray a real world but they also built imaginary worlds as well.

The Bowery, looking north

This tinted postcard depicts the Bowery in Manhattan, probably between 1901 and 1905. It was published by A. C. Bosselman & Co. of New York but like most better quality postcards at the time it was printed in Germany.

The tinted halftone process added layers of printed color to an original black and white image, and thus represented a kind of hybrid between photomechanical and traditional ink printmaking. The appearance of the finished image would be affected by the skill, the patience, and in some cases the imagination of the printer; details might be added or brushed out as desired. Some of the vehicles and figures shown above appear to have been retouched by the printmaker, and details like the steeple in the distance between the two converging rail lines were probably added as well.

The New York Public Library has a photograph, attributed to John Loeffler and dated 1895, that depicts a similar vista.

(Courtesy the New York Public Library)

John Loeffler died in 1901; the postcard below, which corresponds closely with the Bosselman card, was published by his brother August, who was active until 1905.

(Courtesy the New York Public Library)

Here is yet another version, issued by the Souvenir Post Card Co., which was active from 1905-1914. It uses the relatively crude line block halftone process.

(Courtesy the New York Public Library)

In addition to the coloring, there are a number of differences between the photograph and the postcards. Whether there once existed an alternate photographic original or whether the differences were due to retouching I don't know. The general prospect looking uptown was evidently a popular one, and a number of imitations or variations were marketed. The next image, published by Valentine & Sons (active from 1907-1909), has only one train and a far less busy street, but a bridge has sprouted crosstown in the middle distance.

(Via Wikipedia)

Looking from one image to another, pedestrians who stride by unaware of the photographer's presence or who may never have existed at all appear and disappear, signs leap out or vanish, streetcars and elevated trains advance like the flickering phantoms of early motion pictures. In some images trucks replace trolley cars, day becomes night, yet some of the same figures seem to stroll in the shadows of the elevated rails. Below are a few among many. The first one, by the way, is the only one that clearly depicts the casket factory sign that appears in Loeffler's photo, and thus is probably a direct descendant.





This uncredited photograph, via the Bowery Boys, also shows a roughly similar perspective, though it doesn't seem to match up closely with any of the postcards. The "casket" sign isn't shown, but there seems to be a "coffin" one on the same building.


Here, from the digital collections of Library of Congress, are two photographic views taken by J. S. Johnston in 1895. Either or both may have been retouched a bit.



The card below, published by the prolific Detroit Publishing Co., provides a different angle and a better view of the faces of some of the buildings on the west side of the street, including the Gaiety Musée, a famous vaudeville theatre, whose garish facade, just uptown from Glassman's Hats, is much less obvious in the other pictures. Dominating the scene is the monstrous bulk of the Bowery Savings Bank, designed by Stanford White (and now a registered landmark).

(Via the Georgetown County Digital Library)

One of the things that appeals to me about many of these images (other than their historical content) is that they seem to inhabit a fertile middle ground, staking out various points along a spectrum between the supposedly "documentary" status of photography and the "artificial" methods of painting and drawing. (Later postcards, which fall solidly into one camp or the other, seem as a consequence far less interesting.) The same basic scene could be reshot, or an older original could be adapted, in order to include details that would make the final image more quaint or more contemporary as market tastes might demand. Complete "fidelity" in mass reproduction, at least in regard to color, was as yet impossible in any case. In my next post I'll look at a few more examples of image manipulation.

I am grateful to the phenomenal resources of the Metropolitan Postcard Collectors Club for much of the background information above, but any confusion is my own.

A temple bell in Kyoto, Japan

The image above, hand-dated 1905, probably depicts the bell at the Chion-in Temple, which is said to be Japan's largest. It appears to be a hand-tinted collotype; there is no dot pattern that would indicate lithography.

The card is addressed to "Mrs. Militz" at the Home of Truth in Alameda, California, presumably Annie Rix Militz, a prominent New Thought minister who had co-founded the Home of Truth that year before traveling abroad. The initials on the front also read A.R.M., so she may have mailed it home to herself as a souvenir. The stamp has been torn off, no doubt for a collector's album, obliterating with it most of what must have been the original Japanese postmark. There is no message on the back, as postal reservations at the time reserved that space for the address alone.

The Russo-Japanese War had concluded a few weeks before this card was mailed. Lafcadio Hearn had died in Tokyo one year earlier; the great San Francisco earthquake, across the bay from Alameda, still lay a few months off.

Cortázar: Último Round and La vuelta al día

Julio Cortázar's collections La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos ("Around the Day in Eighty Worlds") and Último Round ("Last Round") were published in 1967 and 1969 respectively by Siglo XXI Editores in Mexico. Each work is made up of of two volumes and contains stories, essays, poems, and anecdotes as well as photographs, period engravings and other artwork selected by the designer, the artist Julio Silva. Among the highlights are Cortázar's long introduction to the Cuban novelist José Lezama Lima, appreciations of Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, and Clifford Brown, the short stories "Silvia" and "With Justifiable Pride," and an essay on Jack the Ripper and other notorious murderers.


The coincidence of the author's and designer's first names goes further than is immediately evident, since another "Julio" -- Jules Verne -- serves as a kind of tutelary spirit, at least for La vuelta al día, which borrows its title, in mutated form, from one of Verne's most famous works.


In designing the layout of the interior of the books, Silva employed a variety of different typefaces, some of them antique; here and there the text is rotated 90 degrees, proceeding across the page from left to right. The illustrations chosen to complement Cortázar's texts were taken from a wide variety of sources. For the essay on Lezama Lima, to cite one example, he incorporated engravings from 19th-century editions of Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre, early scientific and hermetic treatises, runes, and tarot cards. Elsewhere he uses original drawings, old advertisements and clippings, and paintings by Paul Delvaux.

For Último Round, he created newspaper-style exterior art that worked in references to the pieces inside the book as well as quotations from Italo Calvino and Gary Snyder and at least one sly allusion to one of Cortázar's earlier books. Circled on the back of Tomo I, in what appears to be a clipping from a column of personal ads, is a nod to Cortázar's novel 62: A Model Kit:

ARE YOU sensitive, intelligent, anxious or a little lonely? Neurotics Anonymous are a lively, mixed group who believe that the individual is unique. Details s.a.e. Box 8662.

(In the novel, one of the characters discovers this ad, purportedly found in the New Statesman, and decides to investigate.)

In keeping with the vernacular spirit of the design, and perhaps under the influence of 19th-century Mexican chapbooks by artists such as José Guadalupe Posada, these "artist's books" were nevertheless intended to be inexpensive. They were printed on relatively cheap paper in small formats (La vuelta is only 3 1/2 inches wide) and have gone through numerous printings both in their original editions and in other formats, including this curious version of Último Round, which I haven't been able to identify:



[In an editor's note to one of Cortázar's letters to Silva there is a cryptic reference to "a book guillotined in the middle," but judging by the date the letter seems to refer to La vuelta al día rather than Último Round, and may describe the presentation of the book in two volumes rather than one.]

The 1986 North Point Press edition of Thomas Christensen's translation, below, is based on the contents of the French edition, Le tour du jour en quatre-vingts mondes, for which Cortázar himself chose selections from the original volumes of both La vuelta al día and Último Round, some of the excluded pieces probably having been deemed to be all but impossible to translate.


The North Point volume dispenses with the original array of fonts but makes a handsome book in its own right. The jacket design, by David Bullen, uses a painting by Paul Delvaux, Le Veilleur II. The panels on the cover have a pale greenish tint that for some reason doesn't show up well in my scan.